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Showing posts from July, 2020

The viral footprints: Are we the living fossils...?

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Recall what you know about DNA, genes, and genome. We usually know that it is the genetic makeup of an organism that makes the organism unique including us. We are humans because we have the DNA content that makes us look like and think like humans.  The greatest breakthroughs in science don't come by proving something but asking more proximate questions to the old problems only to come up with a more stunning revelation. Considering the human species on this planet, we have a very brief history to tell on evolutionary time scales since the origins of life. Most of the time our planet has cherished the existence of microbes and later on primitive single-celled eukaryotes. While we call the present year as the year of pandemic worst-hit by a virus, there is an immense battle going on between bacteria and viruses in the environment, for millions of years and still continuing today on an unimaginable large scale. This led to another discovery of bacterial DNA carrying the genes of the